Best Programming Languages in Africa
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Compare the Top Programming Languages in Africa as of April 2026
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This a list of Programming Languages in Africa. Use the filters on the left to add additional filters for products that have integrations with Africa. View the products that work with Africa in the table below.
What are Programming Languages in Africa?
Programming languages are a set of rules that form a language that programmers and developers can use to write software, applications, web apps, mobile apps, scripts, and more. Compare and read user reviews of the best Programming Languages in Africa currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
MATLAB
The MathWorks
MATLAB® combines a desktop environment tuned for iterative analysis and design processes with a programming language that expresses matrix and array mathematics directly. It includes the Live Editor for creating scripts that combine code, output, and formatted text in an executable notebook. MATLAB toolboxes are professionally developed, rigorously tested, and fully documented. MATLAB apps let you see how different algorithms work with your data. Iterate until you’ve got the results you want, then automatically generate a MATLAB program to reproduce or automate your work. Scale your analyses to run on clusters, GPUs, and clouds with only minor code changes. There’s no need to rewrite your code or learn big data programming and out-of-memory techniques. Automatically convert MATLAB algorithms to C/C++, HDL, and CUDA code to run on your embedded processor or FPGA/ASIC. MATLAB works with Simulink to support Model-Based Design. -
2
Java
Oracle
The Java™ Programming Language is a general-purpose, concurrent, strongly typed, class-based object-oriented language. It is normally compiled to the bytecode instruction set and binary format defined in the Java Virtual Machine Specification. In the Java programming language, all source code is first written in plain text files ending with the .java extension. Those source files are then compiled into .class files by the javac compiler. A .class file does not contain code that is native to your processor; it instead contains bytecodes — the machine language of the Java Virtual Machine1 (Java VM). The java launcher tool then runs your application with an instance of the Java Virtual Machine.Starting Price: Free -
3
Python
Python
The core of extensible programming is defining functions. Python allows mandatory and optional arguments, keyword arguments, and even arbitrary argument lists. Whether you're new to programming or an experienced developer, it's easy to learn and use Python. Python can be easy to pick up whether you're a first-time programmer or you're experienced with other languages. The following pages are a useful first step to get on your way to writing programs with Python! The community hosts conferences and meetups to collaborate on code, and much more. Python's documentation will help you along the way, and the mailing lists will keep you in touch. The Python Package Index (PyPI) hosts thousands of third-party modules for Python. Both Python's standard library and the community-contributed modules allow for endless possibilities.Starting Price: Free -
4
Kotlin
Kotlin
Easy to pick up, so you can create powerful applications immediately. Compatible with the Java ecosystem. Use your favorite JVM frameworks and libraries. Share application logic between web, mobile, and desktop platforms while keeping an experience native to users. Save time and get the benefit of unlimited access to features specific to these platforms. Kotlin has great support and many contributors in its fast-growing global community. Enjoy the benefits of a rich ecosystem with a wide range of community libraries. Help is never far away — consult extensive community resources or ask the Kotlin team directly. Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile is an SDK for iOS and Android app development. It offers all the combined benefits of creating cross-platform and native apps. Maintain a single codebase for networking, data storage, analytics, and the other logic of your Android and iOS apps.Starting Price: Free -
5
PHP
PHP
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world. The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.0.20. When using the PHP.net website, there is even no need to get to a search box to access the content you would like to see quickly. You can use short PHP.net URLs to access pages directly.Starting Price: Free -
6
Swift
Apple
Writing Swift code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and Swift includes modern features developers love. Swift code is safe by design and produces software that runs lightning-fast. Swift is the result of the latest research on programming languages, combined with decades of experience building Apple platforms. Named parameters are expressed in a clean syntax that makes APIs in Swift even easier to read and maintain. Even better, you don’t even need to type semi-colons. Inferred types make code cleaner and less prone to mistakes, while modules eliminate headers and provide namespaces. To best support international languages and emoji, Strings are Unicode-correct and use a UTF-8 based encoding to optimize performance for a wide-variety of use cases. You can even write concurrent code with simple, built-in keywords that define asynchronous behavior, making your code more readable and less error-prone.Starting Price: Free -
7
Ruby
Ruby Language
Wondering why Ruby is so popular? Its fans call it a beautiful, artful language. And yet, they say it’s handy and practical. Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity. Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, climbed to an average of 200 messages per day in 2006. It has dropped in recent years as the size of the community pushed discussion from one central list into many smaller groups. Ruby is ranked among the top 10 on most of the indices that measure the growth and popularity of programming languages worldwide (such as the TIOBE index). Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework.Starting Price: Free -
8
TypeScript
TypeScript
TypeScript adds additional syntax to JavaScript to support a tighter integration with your editor. Catch errors early in your editor. TypeScript code converts to JavaScript, which runs anywhere JavaScript runs: In a browser, on Node.js or Deno and in your apps. TypeScript understands JavaScript and uses type inference to give you great tooling without additional code. TypeScript was used by 78% of the 2020 State of JS respondents, with 93% saying they would use it again. The most common kinds of errors that programmers write can be described as type errors: a certain kind of value was used where a different kind of value was expected. This could be due to simple typos, a failure to understand the API surface of a library, incorrect assumptions about runtime behavior, or other errors.Starting Price: Free -
9
Scala
Scala
Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language. Scala's static types help avoid bugs in complex applications, and its JVM and JavaScript runtimes let you build high-performance systems with easy access to huge ecosystems of libraries. The Scala compiler is smart about static types. Most of the time, you need not tell it the types of your variables. Instead, its powerful type inference will figure them out for you. In Scala, case classes are used to represent structural data types. They implicitly equip the class with meaningful toString, equals and hashCode methods, as well as the ability to be deconstructed with pattern matching. In Scala, functions are values, and can be defined as anonymous functions with a concise syntax.Starting Price: Free -
10
Perl
Perl
Perl is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 30 years of development. Perl is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 30 years of development. Perl runs on over 100 platforms from portables to mainframes and is suitable for both rapid prototyping and large scale development projects. "Perl" is a family of languages, "Raku" (formerly known as "Perl 6") is part of the family, but it is a separate language which has its own development team. Its existence has no significant impact on the continuing development of "Perl". Perl includes powerful tools for processing text that make it ideal for working with HTML, XML, and all other mark-up and natural languages. Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.Starting Price: Free -
11
Fortran
Fortran
Fortran has been designed from the ground up for computationally intensive applications in science and engineering. Mature and battle-tested compilers and libraries allow you to write code that runs close to the metal, fast. Fortran is statically and strongly typed, which allows the compiler to catch many programming errors early on for you. This also allows the compiler to generate efficient binary code. Fortran is a relatively small language that is surprisingly easy to learn and use. Expressing most mathematical and arithmetic operations over large arrays is as simple as writing them as equations on a whiteboard. Fortran is a natively parallel programming language with intuitive array-like syntax to communicate data between CPUs. You can run almost the same code on a single CPU, on a shared-memory multicore system, or on a distributed-memory HPC or cloud-based system.Starting Price: Free -
12
Haskell
Haskell
Every expression in Haskell has a type that is determined at compile time. All the types composed together by function application have to match up. If they don't, the program will be rejected by the compiler. Types become not only a form of guarantee, but a language for expressing the construction of programs. Every function in Haskell is a function in the mathematical sense (i.e., "pure"). Even side-effecting IO operations are but a description of what to do, produced by pure code. There are no statements or instructions, only expressions that cannot mutate variables (local or global) nor access state like time or random numbers. You don't have to explicitly write out every type in a Haskell program. Types will be inferred by unifying every type bidirectionally. However, you can write out types if you choose, or ask the compiler to write them for you for handy documentation.Starting Price: Free -
13
R
The R Foundation
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity. One of R’s strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed.Starting Price: Free -
14
Rust
Rust
Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages. Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — enabling you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling — an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more. Whip up a CLI tool quickly with Rust’s robust ecosystem. Rust helps you maintain your app with confidence and distribute it with ease. Use Rust to supercharge your JavaScript, one module at a time. Publish to npm, bundle with webpack, and you’re off to the races.Starting Price: Free -
15
Go
Golang
With a strong ecosystem of tools and APIs on major cloud providers, it is easier than ever to build services with Go. With popular open source packages and a robust standard library, use Go to create fast and elegant CLIs. With enhanced memory performance and support for several IDEs, Go powers fast and scalable web applications. With fast build times, lean syntax, an automatic formatter and doc generator, Go is built to support both DevOps and SRE. Everything there is to know about Go. Get started on a new project or brush up for your existing Go code. An interactive introduction to Go in three sections. Each section concludes with a few exercises so you can practice what you've learned. The Playground allows anyone with a web browser to write Go code that we immediately compile, link, and run on our servers.Starting Price: Free -
16
Apache Groovy
The Apache Software Foundation
Apache Groovy is a powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform aimed at improving developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax. It integrates smoothly with any Java program, and immediately delivers to your application powerful features, including scripting capabilities, Domain-Specific Language authoring, runtime and compile-time meta-programming and functional programming. Concise, readable and expressive syntax, easy to learn for Java developers. Closures, builders, runtime & compile-time meta-programming, functional programming, type inference, and static compilation. Flexible & malleable syntax, advanced integration & customization mechanisms, to integrate readable business rules in your applications. Great for writing concise and maintainable tests, and for all your build and automation tasks.Starting Price: Free -
17
Julia
Julia
Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. Julia uses multiple dispatch as a paradigm, making it easy to express many object-oriented and functional programming patterns. The talk on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch explains why it works so well. Julia is dynamically typed, feels like a scripting language, and has good support for interactive use. Julia provides asynchronous I/O, metaprogramming, debugging, logging, profiling, a package manager, and more. One can build entire Applications and Microservices in Julia. Julia is an open source project with over 1,000 contributors. It is made available under the MIT license.Starting Price: Free -
18
Lua
Lua Language
Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.Starting Price: Free -
19
Erlang
Erlang
Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems. It includes its own distributed database, applications to interface towards other languages, debugging and release handling tools.Starting Price: Free -
20
Vala
The GNOME Project
Vala is a programming language using modern high level abstractions without imposing additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C. Vala uses the GObject type system and has additional code generation routines that make targeting the GNOME stack simple. Vala has many other uses where native binaries are required. More. There is GNOME Discourse for developer and general discussions. You can also join the Vala Matrix channel for asking questions and talking with the developers. Vala is a cross platform development tool with third party distributions providing binaries for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSDs and other platforms.Starting Price: Free -
21
F#
F#
F# gives you simplicity and succinctness like Python with correctness, robustness and performance beyond C# or Java. F# is open source, cross-platform and free to use with professional tooling. F# is a JavaScript and .NET language for web, cloud, data-science, apps and more. Cloud computing relies on leveraging multiple integrated services. Using multiple services required a unique set of technologies and capabilities, and F# excels in this domain. With the recent rise of cloud solutions, it is becoming increasingly easy to deploy multiple services “in the cloud”, expanding what is possible both by storing large amounts of data and running heavy computations distributed across clusters of machines.Starting Price: Free -
22
Elixir
Elixir
Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. Elixir is successfully used in web development, embedded software, data ingestion, and multimedia processing, across a wide range of industries. Check our getting started guide and our learning page to begin your journey with Elixir. All Elixir code runs inside lightweight threads of execution (called processes) that are isolated and exchange information via messages. Due to their lightweight nature, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of processes running concurrently in the same machine. Isolation allows processes to be garbage collected independently, reducing system-wide pauses, and using all machine resources as efficiently as possible (vertical scaling). Processes are also able to communicate with other processes running on different machines in the same network.Starting Price: Free -
23
PowerShell
Microsoft
PowerShell is a cross-platform task automation and configuration management framework, consisting of a command-line shell and scripting language. Unlike most shells, which accept and return text, PowerShell is built on top of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR), and accepts and returns .NET objects. This fundamental change brings entirely new tools and methods for automation. Unlike traditional command-line interfaces, PowerShell cmdlets are designed to deal with objects. An object is structured information that is more than just the string of characters appearing on the screen. Command output always carries extra information that you can use if you need it. If you've used text-processing tools to process data in the past, you'll find that they behave differently when used in PowerShell. In most cases, you don't need text-processing tools to extract specific information. You directly access portions of the data using standard PowerShell object syntax.Starting Price: Free -
24
JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a scripting language and programming language for the web that enables developers to build dynamic elements on the web. Over 97% of the websites in the world use client-side JavaScript. JavaScript is one of the most important scripting languages on the web. Strings in JavaScript are contained within a pair of either single quotation marks '' or double quotation marks "". Both quotes represent Strings but be sure to choose one and STICK WITH IT. If you start with a single quote, you need to end with a single quote. There are pros and cons to using both IE single quotes tend to make it easier to write HTML within Javascript as you don’t have to escape the line with a double quote. Let’s say you’re trying to use quotation marks inside a string. You’ll need to use opposite quotation marks inside and outside of JavaScript single or double quotes.Starting Price: Free -
25
Clojure
Clojure
Clojure is a robust, practical, and fast programming language with a set of useful features that together form a simple, coherent, and powerful tool. Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language, yet remains completely dynamic, every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When a mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system.Starting Price: Free -
26
YAML
YAML
YAML: YAML Ain't Markup Language. YAML is a human-friendly data serialization language for all programming languages.Starting Price: Free -
27
D
D Language Foundation
D is a general-purpose programming language with static typing, systems-level access, and C-like syntax. With the D Programming Language, write fast, read fast, and run fast. D is made possible through the hard work and dedication of many volunteers, with the coordination and outreach of the D Language Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. You can help further the development of the D language and help grow our community by supporting the Foundation. Discuss D on the forums, join the IRC channel, read our official Blog, or follow us on Twitter. Browse the wiki, where among other things you can find the high-level vision of the D Language Foundation. Refer to the language specification and the documentation of Phobos, D's standard library. The DMD manual tells you how to use the compiler. Read various articles to deepen your understanding.Starting Price: Free -
28
Bash
Bash
Bash is a free software Unix shell and command language. It has become the default login shell for most Linux distributions. In addition to being available on Linux systems, a version of Bash is also available for Windows through the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Bash is the default user shell in Solaris 11 and was the default shell in Apple macOS from version 10.3 until the release of macOS Catalina, which changed the default shell to zsh. Despite this change, Bash remains available as an alternative shell on macOS systems. As a command processor, Bash allows users to enter commands in a text window that are then executed by the system. Bash can also read and execute commands from a file, known as a shell script. It supports a number of features commonly found in Unix shells, including wildcard matching, piping, here documents, command substitution, variables, and control structures for condition testing and iteration. Bash is compliant with the POSIX shell standards.Starting Price: Free -
29
Objective-C
Objective-C
Objective-C is the primary programming language you use when writing software for OS X and iOS. It’s a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime. Objective-C inherits the syntax, primitive types, and flow control statements of C and adds syntax for defining classes and methods. It also adds language-level support for object graph management and object literals while providing dynamic typing and binding, deferring many responsibilities until runtime. When building apps for OS X or iOS, you’ll spend most of your time working with objects. Those objects are instances of Objective-C classes, some of which are provided for you by Cocoa or Cocoa Touch and some of which you’ll write yourself. -
30
C++
C++
C++ is a simple and clear language in its expressions. It is true that a piece of code written with C++ may be seen by a stranger of programming a bit more cryptic than some other languages due to the intensive use of special characters ({}[]*&!|...), but once one knows the meaning of such characters it can be even more schematic and clear than other languages that rely more on English words. Also, the simplification of the input/output interface of C++ in comparison to C and the incorporation of the standard template library in the language, makes the communication and manipulation of data in a program written in C++ as simple as in other languages, without losing the power it offers. It is a programming model that treats programming from a perspective where each component is considered an object, with its own properties and methods, replacing or complementing structured programming paradigm, where the focus was on procedures and parameters.Starting Price: Free
